Sharing of information within an organization, such as a corporation, is important to remain competitive in the global economy. The problem of efficient and timely information sharing increases as a corporation grows in size as workers become specialized and geographically separated within an organization. Valuable information can include project updates and deadlines, answers to frequently asked questions, competitive intelligence, and references.
Web-based information repositories and collaborative authoring environments, such as wikis, have been deployed in corporate environments to encourage employees to share knowledge at a centralized location. Wikis allow for developing and organizing valuable knowledge through collaborative authoring tools. Despite their wide deployment, wikis have been slow to be adopted by workers due to high interaction costs in time involved in contributing to, and organizing, wiki content. The low adoption rate prevents wikis from reaching a critical mass needed to become a valuable tool for knowledge sharing.
Conventional wikis often suffer from data sparsity and poor organization due to their static nature and lack of support for organization and maintenance of content. Generally, only one view of the wiki content is available to a user, which is unhelpful as different users may have specific information needs that are not satisfied by the single view offered by the wiki. Additionally, the lack of organizational tools leads to difficulty finding content or even duplication of content within the wiki.
Moreover, a worker typically has to undertake a multi-step process to add content to a wiki, including retrieving the correct uniform resource locator from multiple potential relevant wikis, remembering any necessary login information, opening the correct wiki editor in a Web browser, switching to the source of the content to be added, such as an email client, copying the content, switching back to the wiki editor, finding the appropriate portion of the wiki to add the content, and pasting the copied content to the section. The greater number of interaction steps, information channels to manage, and context switches required from workers is one of the main reasons that most knowledge sharing continues occurs through other channels, such as email, instant messaging, and microblogging.
Some approaches intended to address the shortcomings of standard wikis have been developed. For example, Vispedia, as described in Chan et al., “Vispedia: On-demand Data Integration for Interactive Visualization and Exploration,” Proceedings of SIGMOD (ACM), 2009, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference, provides alternative visual representations of data in tables in wikis. However, Vispedia requires that formal metadata has been previously associated with unstructured content. This requirement relies on the assumption that users will put in the time and effort to associate metadata with content, which is often not the case.
Additionally, Wikilu, as described in Hoffart et al., “An Architecture to Support Intelligent User Interfaces for Wikis by Means of Natural Language Processing,” Proceedings of Wikisyms (ACM), 2009, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference, extends wikis with Natural Language Processing techniques to provide suggestions to a user of where to add content to, or how to rearrange existing content in, a wiki. However, new content must be input manually by the user and the new content is not automatically suggested to the user.
Accordingly, there is a need for to lower user interaction costs with shared information repositories by integrating recommended content within the context of the shared information repositories while allowing for early curation and organization of information through alternative visualizations of content.